Obituary

Harry Gold

The bass saxophone, an Alice In Wonderland instrument that looks like a hookah for giants, is the kind of musical folly you might expect even normally proportioned musicians to avoid, let alone one who struggled to reach 5ft 2in in his socks. Yet for Harry Gold, the East End saxophonist who heard the Original Dixieland Jazz Band - the first jazz musicians ever to make a record - in person, became one of the most popular figures of the postwar Dixieland revival and was still touring well into his 90s, the bass sax was the instrument of choice.

Perhaps as a diminutive individual, Gold, who has died aged 98, liked its big, cavernous sound and spectacular presence on a stage - the cartoonist Trog even depicted him standing on a chair to play it. But if Gold had a passion for an instrument that has mostly belonged to jazz's jauntiest, most carefree age - when a brass band feel still clung to much of the music, and the double-bass had not yet come into its own - he was also a musician of considerable sophistication who played several saxophones, and with a grasp of theory rare for Dixielanders.

He was a skilled arranger, a quality that lent distinctiveness to his own bands and those of others, as well as providing him with a fallback income in difficult years. He was also a tenacious campaigner for jazz recognition, inside and outside the music business. In the 1940s, he was one of a small group of jazz musicians to shift the Musicians' Union policy over pay rates away from its classical bias. He loved playing all his life, and relished any opportunity at any age.

He was born Harry Goldberg, to a Romanian mother, Hetty Schulman, and a German father, Sam Goldberg. The family had first emigrated to England, but lived briefly in Dundrum, County Dublin, which is where Harry was born, the eldest of six children. His father was a tailor who loved music, often sewing while sitting cross-legged on a table to gain better proximity to the gaslight, and singing arias and popular music-hall songs. He also played the piano by ear, and sang with a remarkably wide range, which Gold always cited as his first introduction to music.

Shortly before the outbreak of the first world war, the family moved to Leystonstone, and then to the East End. The headteacher of the local Berners Street school was a music-lover whose principal interest in his pupils was whether or not they could sing in tune. Gold was thus fascinated by music by his early teens, and when he was 14 - by then out of school and working all the overtime he could in his father's business - he bought an alto saxophone.

He also persuaded his father to take him to hear the Original Dixieland Jazz Band during their long residency at the Hammersmith Palais in 1919. Gold recalled that he did not understand what they were doing, but that the music's energy had such an effect on him it made up his mind to become a musician there and then.

He learned the saxophone, the clarinet and the oboe under Louis Kimmel, a professor at the London College of Music, and the relationship was fruitful for five years until Gold began to experiment with the jazz saxophone sounds he heard on the radio.

He responded to an advertisement in the local paper, placed by a then unknown violinist called Joe Loss. After unsteady beginnings with a pianist who could only play on the black keys, the group improved to become the Magnetic Dance Band. Gold's relationship with Loss would continue down the years. Gold also formed the Florentine Dance Band with Polish guitarist Ivor Mairants, and gave up his day job at Christmas 1923 - a two-week residency at the Palais de Dance, Rochester, was sufficient incentive - never to take another.

Joining a cooperative band that came to be called the Metronomes, Gold also began to flower as an arranger, using Kimmel's meticulous instruction, and continuing to attend music college. He spent almost three years with the Metronomes (marrying his first wife, Annie, during this period) and, while doing a job in the West End, heard American musician Fred Elizalde's band, featuring the formidable bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini.

Gold bought his first bass sax from Rollini, a battered instrument that had fallen out of a car, and which he had to spend a fortune on putting right. With Mairants and trumpeter Les Lambert, Gold also formed a vocal trio, the Cubs - he liked the vocal music of the Boswell Sisters and Bing Crosby's Rhythm Boys - and when the American bandleader Roy Fox heard the three singing at the Princes restaurant, Piccadilly, he invited them to join him.

Gold would remark that his socialist convictions were reinforced by comparing his own background with the wealth of the clientele at Fox's gigs, at such venues as the Cafe de Paris, where the regulars included the Duke and Duchess of Kent and the Prince of Wales. But he enjoyed touring with Fox's band, and the conviviality of musicians' lives on the road. He would frequently find himself on the same bill as comedians like Max Wall, or the eccentric tapdance trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty.

But, in 1936, Gold and Mairants parted company with Fox, in a dispute over contracts and pay - the experience led Gold to become an active trade unionist, devoted to extending Musicians' Union policy (primarily geared to orchestral and theatre players) to include jazz musicians as well. In 1938, touring in the north, he also met his second wife Peggy, a jazz fan and member of the Bradford Rhythm Club.

Having been rejected for active service on fitness grounds, Gold did not see combat during the second world war, though he did have periods of labouring work. In between those breaks, from spring 1939 to 1942, he played with the Latvian-born bandleader Oscar Rabin. The band was good, but needed more variety to broaden its appeal, and so Gold offered Rabin a band within a band - this was the group that came to be known as Harry Gold's Pieces of Eight and that worked in a broadly Dixieland jazz style, with various line-ups, until its leader's last years.

During the latter stages of the war, Gold worked for two of the most popular British dance bands, Geraldo's and Bert Ambrose's. He also began to find more work for the Pieces of Eight, and also freelanced as an arranger for the BBC, on occasion collaborating with the young Norrie Paramor, later to become a producer of early 1960s pop hits for Cliff Richard, Frank Ifield, Helen Shapiro and Billy Fury. In Paris with the services entertainment troupe, Ensa, on the day the war ended, Gold was one of a group of musicians asked to broadcast to a home audience from the grounds of the British embassy, with the sound of the celebrations behind them.

In December 1945, the Piece of Eight recorded for the first time, and began regularly appearing on the BBC's Music While You Work radio show, an experiment to see if Dixieland jazz could work on a predominantly light-music repertoire. By now, Gold's saxophonist brother Laurie was in the line-up as well.

The group also almost became one of the earliest British bands to perform on television when the Alexandra Palace broadcasting station went on air again in 1946. Their number was pulled because the producer refused to allow Gold's black trombonist, Geoff Love, and the band's white singer, Jane Lee, to perform a duet together on television. The group's status and popularity was, however, unaffected - one of their public admirers was the singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, who warmly commended the Pieces when they accompanied him on tour in 1948.

With Love, Paramor, and his brother Laurie, Gold expanded his activities into freelancing, arranging services, and, for a brief period, general theatrical management, before more powerful operators squeezed them out. Gold's determination to negotiate fair deals also ran him into difficulties with a new broom in BBC Variety radio, his regular employers as an arranger. In one particularly heated discussion between the saxophonist and the new producer, Gold found himself being frankly asked: "Are you a red?"

In 1955, Gold turned the band over to Laurie, in order to stay at home more often with his family, and concentrate on session jobs and office work for a Soho music publisher. He also began playing in a classical saxophone quartet and worked at EMI as a staff arranger, with his son David.

But when EMI retired an indignant Gold on age grounds in the 1970s, he was ready to start performing all over again. He found much pleasure in cornetist Richard Sudhalter's band, formed to celebrate the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Paul Whiteman - with Gold relishing the bass-sax parts originally played by his old model Adrian Rollini. In 1977, he re-formed the Pieces of Eight with a new line-up, and the band toured again into the 1980s, often in eastern Europe.

Though he wound it up again after internal arguments, he regularly returned to performing - frequently at his London local, the Yorkshire Grey, in Clerkenwell - and recovered an interest in live work to fill the gap left by the death of Peggy, his partner of half a century. In 1998, he played in California, Connecticut, New York and at the Cork festival. "Have sax, will travel," Gold would say. He was as open to doing that in his 90s as he had ever been.

His autobiography, Gold, Doubloons and Pieces of Eight (co-written with Roger Cotterrell) appeared in 2000. He is survived by Morton and Leslie, the twin boys from his first marriage, and by Andrew and David, the sons of his second marriage.

· Harry Gold, jazz musician, born February 26 1907; died November 13 2005